Chronicles of the Strange and Mysterious

by Chronicles of the Strange

  Dame Joan Evans, an Oxford art historian and friend and literary executor of the two authors of An Adventure, was one of those who settled for a down-to-earth explanation. She discovered from a book published in the 1960s that a rakish aristocrat called Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezenzac had been obsessed with the fashions of the eighteenth century and often wore clothes of the period. Moreover, he frequented the gardens of Versailles and organized tableaux vivants or pageants in which he and his cronies wore eighteenth-century costume. Dame Joan concluded that Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain had stumbled upon one of the count's rehearsals and that all the people they had met in the gardens had been acting.

  Miss Moberly is known to have mistaken a real person for a ghost on at least one occasion. Two years after An Adventure was published she visited the Louvre in Paris, where she noticed an extraordinary man. He had 'a small golden coronal on his head, and wore a loose toga-like dress of some light colour'.

  After much research, she decided that she had seen the ghost of the Roman Emperor Constantine, who had marched in procession down the road over which the Louvre was later built. But this exotic little scenario was demolished in the 1960s when a Sunday newspaper revealed that there had been an artist living in Paris at the time of the 'vision' who had gone about dressed as a Roman, complete with gold crown, in protest at the ugliness of current fashions.

  In a letter to The Times it was suggested that Miss Moberly had also jumped to the wrong conclusion in her identification of the 'sketching lady':

  At the end of a talk on An Adventure which I gave ... to the Academic de Versailles, [wrote T.G.S. Combe in 1965] a member of my audience informed me that when she was a child there lived in her district at Versailles a lady who, in the summer, used to dress up as Marie-Antoinette and go and sit in the garden of the Petit Trianon. That Miss Moberly saw this lady seems at least more likely than that she could have seen Marie-Antoinette herself.

  Did the two women perhaps share a sort of waking dream? A close reading of An Adventure suggests they did, for they repeatedly refer to an eerie, unreal atmosphere that seemed to pervade the park: 'Everything suddenly looked unnatural, therefore unpleasant; even the trees behind the building seemed to have become flat and lifeless, like a wood worked in tapestry [their italics]. There were no effects of light and shade, and no wind stirred the trees. It was all intensely still.' They claimed to have known little about Versailles before their visit, yet what they actually saw demanded no more than the ability to distinguish outmoded clothes from the fashions of 1901. Moreover, Miss Jourdain had taught French history and they had a guidebook with them.

  Assuming that they did see people on their walk, could they simply have embroidered the facts, vested them with historical significance, dreamt a little? Were there other sources for their 'scenario'? For example, a bestselling novel about time travel called Lumen, in which the hero sees the French Revolution happening seventy years after the actual events, had been published in England as recently as 1897, and a story about Marie-Antoinette from Pearson's Magazine (published in 1893) has many phrases curiously similar to those used by the two ladies to describe their experience.

  Was An Adventure a fantasy shared by two avowed believers in psychical phenomena which finally got out of hand, or did Miss Moberly and Miss Jourdain really take a stroll into the past on that August afternoon in 1901? Both are now long dead and we shall never know the answer. The trail, frustratingly, has now gone cold.

  Yet cases of phantom scenery continue to surface.

  Scene Changes

  One evening in April 1955 Mrs Susannah Stone, who lives near Tain in Ross and Cromarty in the north of Scotland, was driving a friend home after dinner. It was about 9.30, and although the sun had set it was still light. Just outside the town of Alness, Mrs Stone says that she and her companion spotted a house on fire:

  It was a perfectly ordinary house, with a long narrow door in the middle and long windows - quite big, like a farmhouse. It was blazing. Flames were curling out of the windows. I said, 'My God, what a fire! Poor things!'

  We were about a quarter of a mile away and my friend said, 'Let's go down and have a closer look.' It never occurred to me that I'd never seen a house there before.

  We went nearer and it wasn't there.

  Mystified, Mrs Stone drove on, but after dropping her friend she returned to the site of the 'fire'. By now, it was much later: a punctured tyre had delayed her. This time, she walked up the road. She found nothing. 'No fire, no glow, no ashes, no people, nothing,' she says. And the next day, when she checked, she discovered that the fire brigade had been called out - but to a blaze in a couple of haystacks thirty miles from Mrs Stone's mysterious sighting, and in the opposite direction. As far as she can discover, no house of any kind has ever stood on the spot. The experience remains unexplained. It was, says Susannah Stone, 'very creepy'.

  In the late 1940s the Reverend Alfred Byles was Vicar of Yealmpton, South Devon. One Saturday afternoon, while his wife was arranging the altar flowers, he noticed something strange in the churchyard. He wrote later:

  In the middle of the path I saw a hole, of irregular shape, about a yard in width. I thought it was subsidence, and went into the church and told my wife about it. Coming out shortly afterwards, I found that the hole was very much larger, and asked my wife to come out and see it. We both looked into it, and I suggested lowering myself into it. However, it was of uncertain depth, and when I threw in a stone it bumped against stonework, which we could see and which looked like part of a wall.

  My main concern was to prevent an accident to anyone using the path. I therefore went away to get some planks to cover the hole, which measured about three yards across. In the village street I met Mr Knight, the local builder and undertaker, and asked him to come and see the hole. On arrival there was no sign of the hole. The path and the grass verges were exactly as before, with no sign of disturbance. Mr Knight seemed rather less puzzled than I expected, and said, That's all right, sir,' or words to that effect. He never mentioned the incident again.

  Mr Byles, on the other hand, was far less phlegmatic. He was mystified, and remained so more than thirty years later. 'We both of us saw the original hole,' he said, 'and we've never found an adequate explanation.'

  Explanations for 'phantom scenery' are indeed hard to establish: optical illusion, hallucination and 'mislocation' are some of the weapons in the sceptics' armoury, while other investigators have tried to explain the phenomenon in terms of 'retrocognition', arguing that, for reasons not yet understood, a few rare individuals may briefly be allowed to unlatch a door to the past and peer inside. There are few ideas more beguiling. Lucille Iremonger, author of the definitive work on the 'Trianon adventure', expressed its appeal perfectly:

  It is the question that has always haunted man - the question that informs the myths and legends of the ancient world, in which Orpheus visits the underworld and the Sibyl foretells the future; the question whether a human mind can experience happenings outside the narrow groove in which it normally runs ... whether, in fact, you or I could at any moment step back into the past, or -and this follows - out into the future.

  That question has not yet been answered with a decisive yes or no.

  Arthur C. Clarke comments:

  Since 1966 the Science Fiction Writers of America have issued an annual Nebula Award for the year's best fiction in all categories. The short story prize for that year went to Richard McKenna's 'The Secret Place'.

  Unfortunately, McKenna had died two years before at the age of fifty-one having published only six short stories in his lifetime. Like Alex ('Roots') Haley, he was a self-made writer who had risen from the ranks in the US Navy by sheer determination. They both deserved success, and they both achieved it - for McKenna's first and only novel, The Sand Pebbles (1962), was a bestseller and later an excellent film, starring Steve McQueen and featuring a promising young actor named Dickie Attenborough.

  'The Secret Place' is one of thos
e very few stories which quite literally make the hair stand up on the back of my neck (even thinking about it is doing so right now). It concerns a young girl in the Oregon desert who has visions of a time when the landscape was very different:

  'That's where all the dogs are,' she said.

  'Dogs?'

  I looked around at the scrubby sagebush and thin soil and ugly black rock and back at Helen. Something was wrong.

  'Big, stupid dogs that go in herds and eat grass,' she said. She kept turning and gazing. 'Big cats chase the dogs and eat them. The dogs scream and scream. Can't you hear them?'

  Well, some of the visions described in this chapter also appear to go back in time - though not quite as far as the Early Miocene, approximately twenty-five million years ago. Even if, like McKenna's story, they are pure fiction, they certainly demonstrate the power of the human imagination.

  And there may be more to it than that. Do we yet know all the ways in which records of the past have been preserved? Let me quote from the most famous science fiction writer of all:

  A day may come when these recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we in our own persons had been there and shared the thrill and fear of those primordial days; a day may come when the great beasts of the past will leap to life again in our imaginations, when we shall walk again in vanished scenes, stretch painted limbs we thought were dust, and feel again the sunshine of a million years ago. (H.G. Wells, The Grisly Folk)

  ~~~~~~~

  7 - Fairies, Phantoms, Fantastic Photographs

  The Cottingley Fairies

  On 17 July 1972 a most mysterious lot went under the hammer at Sotheby's salerooms in Bond Street, London. At first glance, there was nothing particularly impressive about its contents. There were a couple of old cameras, five old photographs, and a letter from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, to a girl from a country village in the north of England.

  Yet, although the sale contained other, far more obviously desirable lots (five previously unknown letters by the American poet Walt Whitman, original manuscripts by the Victorian artist and poet William Morris, and even a painting by D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley's Lover), it was this strange and rather scruffy collection of objects which stole the limelight. For on offer that Monday morning was a dossier on a case which had first intrigued, then baffled and finally frustrated psychical researchers for more than half a century: the strange tale of the Cottingley Fairies.

  The five photographs lay at the heart of the mystery, for they purported to show real fairies dancing beside a stream at Cottingley in Yorkshire. The pictures were taken between 1917 and 1920 by two young girls. Did they really prove that fairies exist?

  At least one influential figure believed they did. By 1920, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the most celebrated literary figures in the world, thanks to his Sherlock Holmes novels and stories; and his support for the Boer War and other causes of the age had earned him the respect of the British public. So when the 1920 Christmas number of the monthly Strand Magazine appeared, emblazoned with the headline, FAIRIES PHOTOGRAPHED. AN EPOCH-MAKING EVENT DESCRIBED BY A. CONAN DOYLE, there was a sensation.

  With the article, the great man published two of the photographs (the others followed later in the March 1921 edition) and asserted in terms which, despite some slight show of scepticism, did not really invite much in the way of contradiction. 'Should the incidents here narrated, and the photographs attached, hold their own against the criticism which they will excite, it is no exaggeration to say that they will mark an epoch in human thought.'

  The story Conan Doyle had to tell did indeed appear remarkable. In the summer of 1917 a little girl often called Frances Griffiths was staying with her cousin, Elsie Wright, then aged fifteen. They used to while away the days in a wild patch of countryside just below Elsie's garden, known as Cottingley Glen.

  A stream ran through the middle and on its mossy banks, the girls asserted, they regularly saw fairies. When the grown-ups did not seem to believe them, Elsie and Frances appeared surprised, and when scepticism gave way to teasing, the girls were outraged. They would, they announced, provide proof.

  Elsie's father, Arthur Wright, was an amateur photographer, keen enough to have established his own darkroom in the scullery cupboard. Neither girl had ever taken a photograph before, but Elsie persuaded her father to lend her his camera, a popular box-type called a Midg, which he had bought from his uncle for 7s. 6d. The Midg took photographs on a series of individual plates, and Arthur loaded just one of them into the camera before the girls set off for their 'rendezvous' with the Cottingley fairies.

  Before long they were back, excited and eager for the photograph to be developed. Arthur Wright took the plate into the darkroom. Elsie, who had acted as photographer, went too. Under the safelight, the image on the plate began to look very odd indeed. Arthur could make out Frances's face and her right arm and shoulder, but what were those weird white blobs that surrounded her?

  Next day, after the picture had been laboriously printed, came the answer. It showed Frances looking thoughtful, her chin leaning on her right hand. In the foreground, the grasses and wild flowers of Cottingley Glen provided a leafy frame, while the background was indistinct. But, astonishingly, the white blobs which had puzzled Arthur Wright turned out to be four captivating fairies, dressed in swirling gowns.

  One was playing a musical instrument, while the others, arms upraised and legs elegantly pointed, danced joyfully to the music. Every detail came out sharply: the veins of their wings, their silken tresses, the fingers of the fairies' tiny hands. Arthur Wright, though by all accounts impressed by the quality of his daughter's first attempt at photography, was apparently amused but unconvinced. Despite the 'evidence' so speedily furnished, tales of fairies at the bottom of the garden continued to be greeted with raised eyebrows by the grown-ups.

  A few weeks later, the girls again borrowed the camera. This time it was Frances's turn to be the photographer. The picture she took was even more remarkable than the first, for it apparently showed Elsie greeting a grotesque little gnome on a bank at the top of the glen. The creature was conventionally dressed, for a gnome, in black tights; he also wore a jersey through which his wings poked, and on his head was a little pointed cap. He certainly seemed alive, as though he had just rushed out of the long grass to greet his human friend. But once again, Arthur Wright was apparently more impressed by the children's skill as photographers than by their claims to have proved the existence of fairies.

  And there the matter might have rested if Elsie's mother, Polly Wright, had not gone to a lecture in nearby Bradford, where she happened to mention that she had a couple of photographs of fairies at home. The lecturer asked to see them and, when they arrived, she passed them on to a friend in London, Edward L. Gardner, a confirmed believer in the existence of fairies. Gardner, in his turn, asked to see the original negatives; when they reached him, he bicycled from his home in Harlesden to consult an expert photographer, Mr H. Snelling, who pronounced the pictures genuine and furnished Gardner with a letter guaranteeing their authenticity:

  These two negatives are entirely genuine unfaked photographs of single exposure, open-air work, [they] show movement in the fairy figures, and there is no trace whatever of studio work involving card or paper models, dark backgrounds, painted figures etc. In my opinion, they are both straight untouched pictures.

  Soon, Conan Doyle had become involved, and after Gardner had visited the Wrights in Yorkshire and pronounced himself satisfied that the pictures had not been faked, the famous author wrote his article for the Strand Magazine.

  As Conan Doyle had predicted before the magazine was published, his revelations did indeed stimulate controversy. While he and Gardner defended the girls against any imputation that they had perpetrated a hoax upon their trusting elders, the sceptics set about trying to discover how the photographs could have been faked.

  Meanwhile Frances and Elsie had come up with three more remarka
ble pictures, this time taken with cameras of their own which Gardner had given them. These were published in the Strand Magazine in March 1921. The first showed Frances apparently staring at a leaping fairy. Elsie featured in the next one alongside a fairy who was offering her a posy of flowers. Finally, there was the strangest photograph of all, which became known as the 'fairy bower'. Gardner offered this interpretation of it:

  This is especially remarkable as it contains a feature quite unknown to the girls. The sheath or cocoon appearing in the middle of the grasses had not been seen by them before, and they had no idea what it was. Fairy observers of Scotland and the New Forest, however, were familiar with it and described it as a magnetic bath ...

  In the face of Conan Doyle's repeated assertions that the pictures were genuine, and his contention that two young girls would not have been capable of faking such remarkable photographs, the sceptics made little headway. Some, like Miss Dot Inman, a Yorkshire photographer, produced 'fairy photographs' of their own to demonstrate that fraud was possible: her most charming effort showed the little creatures soaring above the domes of Bradford's Alhambra Theatre.